Climate and Resiliency Education | CIRES Building the Capacity of Climate and Resiliency Education through Co-Design Unit Planning and Three-Dimensional Learning What are the causes and effects of a changing climate and how do they impact human lives and the environment? To explore this question, CIRES Education Outreach staff partnered with faculty from the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education and an educator cohort through the Climate Education and Dialogue for Denver Public Schools project. The instructional units developed through this project are available for use by educators and educational organizations, and may be adapted (crediting the original developers and the unit webpage), thus extending the broader impacts of the project. Download a full .ZIP file of each category Middle School High School Design Challenge Download indivudual files below
Vikings Could Have Used ‘Sunstones’ to Navigate the North Atlantic | Nat Geo Education Blog For centuries, Viking seafarers ruled the North Atlantic, braving open seas to travel thousands of kilometers to their colonies in Iceland and Greenland—all without magnetic compasses. How they performed such a feat has long puzzled scientists. Now, one group of researchers has an answer, based on computer simulations—and legendary crystals. (Science) What were Viking sunstones? Teachers, scroll down for a quick list of key resources in our Teachers Toolkit. Vikings probably used “sunstones” to navigate storms like this one.Illustration by Louis S. Discussion Ideas Vikings successfully navigated the treacherous North Atlantic for 300 years, regularly using their spectacular longships to sail between Scandinavia, Iceland, and Greenland. To determine the position of the sun on a cloudy day, Viking navigators may have rotated a sunstone to match up the double-reflection.Photograph by Alkivar, courtesy Wikimedia. How do sunstones work? How did researchers test the efficiency of sunstones?
Visible Learning for Science - Why It's Important The world needs scientists of all types to tackle the questions, challenges, and crises of the 21st century. Schools have the responsibility to educate scientists who can collaborate, solve problems, and innovate. So what works best in K–12 science teaching and learning? We need to make science learning visible. What do we mean by visible learning for science? Learners spend approximately 15,000 hours, or 33 percent of their waking time, in school. Learning is a process that includes surface learning, deep learning, and transfer. Learning is a process Learning is a process that includes surface, deep, and transfer learning. Students understand some science content only at the surface level. With appropriate instruction about how to relate and extend ideas, surface learning becomes deep understanding. But schooling should not stop there. One of the most effective ways to move students from surface to deep to transfer learning is to be clear about the learning. Teacher clarity Challenging tasks
Cultivating Every Child’s Curiosity in the Natural World At the NSTA National Conference in Atlanta, I was honored to give the Mary C. McCurdy lecture on young children and their natural curiosity about how the world works. Anyone who has ever spent time with them knows they are born scientists who are curious about the natural world and continuously question, test, and try to make sense of it. Research studies bear this out: “All children bring basic reasoning skills, knowledge of the natural world, and curiosity, which can be built on to achieve proficiency in science” (see Taking Science to School, NRC 2007). Why, then, do young people become so disinterested in science, often by the time they reach middle school? The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), and the Framework on which they are based, describe an ambitious vision for students’ science learning. In this post, I identify two common practices in elementary school science that interfere with children’s curiosity, coupled with instructional practices that nurture wonder.
Design Fail? Four Key Questions That Help Kids Troubleshoot Imagine this scenario. You’re doing an Engineering Adventures activity with the kids in your afterschool program. They’ve been working hard designing and testing . . . only to discover that their technology doesn’t work as planned. When that bubble wand doesn’t produce any bubbles, or the toy car made from a soda bottle doesn’t roll, don’t despair: this is a teachable moment. Four Questions Bring Problems Into Focus Instead of pointing out where the problem lies, you want to ask questions that help kids troubleshoot for themselves. Here are four questions that help students observe closely: “What happened when you tested your design . . . what did it do, and what did you see?” As you can see, “Why do you think that?” For More Good Questions, Get the Guide Looking for more questioning strategies? Engineering is Elementary is a project of the National Center for Technological Literacy® at the Museum of Science, Boston.
Integrating Computational Thinking into Your Elementary Classroom By Grant Smith Computer science education is not a new field. Much of what we know about the pedagogy and content for elementary students comes from Seymour Papert’s research on teaching elementary students to code back in the 1970’s and 80’s. Pause. If you’re reading this, chances are you are interested in (or already are) teaching your students computational thinking. Many teachers are finding that the best way to teach computational thinking is by integrating it into other subject areas. “In my vision, the child programs the computer, and in doing so, both acquires a sense of mastery over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intense contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building.” After all, if computational thinking is important because it applies to all fields, why aren’t we teaching it as an integrated part of other subjects? For more, see:
Classroom Science Assessment Examples As Wisconsin implements new three-dimensional standards and assessments, educators will need to work together to understand what "three-dimensional" means for science instruction. Sharing initial resources and processes will be a critical piece of moving forward as a state. Generally, the three dimensions of the standards are: disciplinary core ideas - what students know; crosscutting concepts - how students think; and science and engineering practices - what students do. Just like in instruction, these three dimensions should be apparent in assessment, blurring the lines between general student work and assessment. Below are links to some initial work from across the country on 3D assessment, some ideas for creating these types of tasks, and tools for working with students' misconceptions in assessment.
7 Ways to Help Students Self Assess Effectively By Barbara Blackburn Although our assessment of students is critical to learning, we also want students to learn to assess themselves. Encouraging students to take measures of their own learning is more rigorous than the teacher providing all the assessment. As always, with greater rigor comes plenty of support. Let’s look at four strategies that allow students to provide a brief snapshot of their learning, then three that are more detailed. First, you may want to have students assess simply where they are in the learning process. Triangle Reflection Melinda Crean, author of Top Notch Teaching, shares a way to have students reflect on where they are in the process of learning. Musical Notes/Color Clusters Carolyn Chapman and Rita King in their book Differentiated Assessment Strategies: One Tool Doesn’t Fit All provide two ways for students to share how well they understand the content. Similarly, in color clusters, students label their learning progress through a series of colors. Conclusion
News Science notebooks are an everyday part of learning in the Tucson (AZ) Unified School District. Recently, K–8 schools there began using notebooks in conjunction with their kit-based science program. As part of the district’s professional development team, we helped during the implementation at Miller Elementary, where teachers and students undertook this journey together. Now, they can’t imagine learning science without them. When the call to implement notebooks throughout the district came about two years ago, teachers embarked on a coordinated, schoolwide effort. 1. One of the most important ideas that affected the teachers at Miller was the realization that the notebook was a tool for every student to use to construct his or her own conceptual understandings. Consider this example from a group of first- and second-grade students “meeting” snails for the first time. I see it coming out its shell! 2. 3. 4. 5. Resources National Research Council (NRC). 1996.
California Classroom Science » Sensemaking Notebooks: Making Thinking Visible for Both Students and Teachers! by Karen Cerwin “Students can’t yet write independently without basic sentence frames. Their thoughts are usually bigger than what they can put on paper.” – Kindergarten Teacher This quote works for everyone; our thoughts are usually bigger than what anyone can put on paper! Yet, our job as educators is to help students learn to communicate their thinking in meaningful ways. One strategy is to use science notebooks in the classroom in a way that aligns with how scientists use their notebooks in their daily work. Scientists use notebooks as a “thinking journal” in which they record observations and thoughts about a phenomenon they are investigating. How can we translate this use of notebooks into our classrooms? Our focus on developing a “thoughtful notebook practice” for our classrooms has resulted in naming Four Essences of Science Notebooks. Essence of Prior Knowledge All learners bring prior knowledge about a topic or phenomenon. Refrences Bransford, J., A. Richard A.
Tools | Face to Face | AST The most versatile way to make students’ thinking visible is the small group model. Students in groups create their own initial models at the beginning of a unit, then revise these over the course of a unit. These could be representations of the anchoring phenomenon that the teacher has introduced on the first day, or the teacher might ask students to draw a model that is about an event or process similar to the anchoring phenomenon that will be the focus of an entire unit. For example, one of our 5th grade classes was studying the physics of sound. The teacher had students draw a model of a singer who was able to break a glass with just his voice (on right, click to see full view). To the right is a “what if” model of the singer standing a few feet away from the glass and trying it again. One of our high school biology classes was studying ecosystems and in particular the question of why a population of hares in a northern forest would go up and down in regular cycles every 11 years.
How Helping Students to Ask Better Questions Can Transform Classrooms To get started with the QFT, first give students time to develop as many questions as they can, with the instruction not to worry if it’s a “good or bad” question. The only requirement is that they be questions, not statements. After the initial fast brainstorm, talk about the difference between closed and open questions, discussing the advantages and disadvantages of both. “It’s in the working with the questions that something happens,” said Rothstein, co-director of The Right Question Institute, during a session at the Building Learning Communities conference. After working with questions they developed in this way, ask students to pick their best three questions. After producing, improving and strategizing about their questions, the last step is to reflect upon the experience of asking and modifying questions. “It’s a simple process that can be adapted to many different purposes,” Rothstein said. “They wrote the questions.
In Elementary School Science, What's at Stake When We Call an 'Argument' an 'Opinion'? As more teachers are using both the Common Core State Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards, they will increasingly be confronted with a challenge: The standards in literacy and science—and the research literature in the two fields—disagree about when and how students learn to form arguments. In a new article for Educational Researcher, Okhee Lee, a professor of education at New York University, suggests that standards writers and researchers need to consider the confusing and mostly unexamined situation teachers are in and figure out how to change it. "The standards writers meant to help by making connections between science, ELA, and math, but the bodies of literature aren't saying the same thing" about how students learn to form arguments, she said in an interview. "The foundational work hasn't been done ... Teachers, especially in K-5, must be very confused." Teachers in the middle Lee writes that the two disciplines generally agree on the structure of argument.
After 100 Years of the Same Teaching Model It’s Time to Throw Out the Playbook – Education Rickshaw In looking back at my parents’ education in the 1950s and 60s, and my own education in the 1990s and 2000s, I worry sometimes that despite the huge advances that we’ve seen in technology, not much has changed when it comes to how we view learning and how we design learning environments. The transmission model of education is still the name of the game, although in some circles there are signs of its erosion. I would like to take you on a journey in this post, starting from the 1950s banking model (Freire, 1968) of instructional design, before comparing it to my own schooling experiences as a digital native at the turn of the century. Then, finally, I would like to share my vision for C21 learning, and propose some ways that we can move forward so that we are meeting the needs of today. When my parents went to school…. In each of these infographics, students are shown as (S) and teachers as (T). When I went to school…. My dream for school…. – Zach Groshell @mrzachg Like this: Like Loading...